open source marketer and community manager

First thing: Love your community

I’m glad that Jorg Janke shared his experience of developing a commercial open source business with Compiere because you learn from failures as well as success. His long piece has some interesting parts, but what caught my attention most is the various experiments in the sales and revenue model. Janke says

Compiere certainly did not fail due to its technology. It failed due to lack of sales and marketing expertise, execution and the wrong bet to “upgrade” open source minded partners and customers to a traditional, commercial model.

Compiere’s experience shows that it’s very difficult to change the terms of an existing relationship with your community, developers/contributors and channel. It’s not enough to balance proprietary and open source components but you also need to keep the whole ecosystem happy while doing so. You need to make sure your community feels your love: that’s what Compiere failed to do.